Posted
by
timothy
on Wednesday June 09, 2010 @05:39PM
from the delicious-candy dept.

dmbkiwi writes "The latest in the 4.x series of the KDE Software Compilation is due to be released in early August 2010. With the first beta of this release recently unleashed, I thought I'd download the openSuse packages and see what 4.5's got in store for us."

What’s New? The Beta 1 release announcement lists only 4 major new features, which seems a little underwhelming.These are:

A reworked notifications area;

Window tiling;

Webkit in konqueror;

Stability improvements.

One of the big upgrades that was scheduled for KDE SC 4.5 was porting the PIM (ie. kmail, korganizer, kaddressbook) applications to the Akonadi framework. Unfortunately, that process won’t be completed in time for 4.5.0, and will be delayed until 4.5.1. This is a little disappointing given that Akonadi has been full of promise for quite some time, with no real user visible outcomes. It would have been nice to see what Akonadi will bring to the party. However, it’s better to wait until all the kinks are ironed out. But unfortunately, it leaves the KDE 4.5 feature cupboard a little bare.

That being said, there are a whole bunch of little improvements that I’ll talk about later on in this article.

The Beta 1 release announcement lists only 4 major new features, which seems a little underwhelming.

...porting the PIM (ie. kmail, korganizer, kaddressbook) applications to the Akonadi framework. Unfortunately, that process won’t be completed in time for 4.5.0, and will be delayed until 4.5.1...

KDE 4 has had five releases since Jan '08. It wasn't until 4.3 in August '09, 19 months after 4.0, that the thing became tolerable. Prior to then it was very unstable, amazingly memory hungry and lacking features that 3.5.x had had for years. If the only thing 4.5 and all future 4.x releases accomplish is stability enhancements, bug fixes, even less memory use and recovering those few missing features that vanished with 4.0 then the KDE developers deserve our praise.

As far as I'm concerned they can take all that PIM stuff, Akonadi whatever and shovel the lot into 5.x. Do as you will with Konquerer's HTML engine but, with respect, DO NOT FUCK UP THE FILE MANAGEMENT functionality. Linux already has several good browsers so Konquerer's ability to render web pages has little or no actual value any longer.

it leaves the KDE 4.5 feature cupboard a little bare.

Whatever. If they are working on stability and efficiency they do the lords work. 4.x should be rock solid, fast, efficient and feature complete. The rest is damage that belongs in 5.x, which needs to start existing sometime soon and then bake for a good half decade or more.

Like this guy, I have nothing good to say about the KDE developers and their current desire to remove code and replace it with new, less functional, more buggy, code that just happens to have their names on it. It's like they just want to check in stuff with their name to get credit in the community ("I wrote most of KDE, all by myselfs!").

Had I posted this on a KDE forum, it would have been deleted before morning.

It doesn't do much good to come up with a supposedly wonderful rewrite that'll supposedly last a long time, if the process causes everyone to switch to GNOME and render all your work irrelevant. This is the danger that KDE is facing today. There aren't many distros that use KDE any more, and even SUSE has been trying to move to GNOME.

You're mistaking this for Gnome. KDE does not drop features (unless they are being replaced by more awesome features)
Any missing features from 3.x versions of KDE are almost always due to lack of time/effort by developers. Not because it was decided to drop them.

Since you were modded insightful i think i should answer.
It really *is* better.
You see GNOME actively drops features and then the drop itself is presented as a new feature. The dropped features will not come back. The developers think its actually better that way. (Its a whole philosophy)
KDE has had some features missing due to the change from 3.x to 4.x. In the beginning quite a bit of features were lacking, but gradually most have been re-introduced. If any are still missing (and it might be the case)

You really think dropping features for years at a time in a stable release is ok if you just call it a bug, effectively meaning there is no stable release?

All your hyperbole aside, the Gnome strategy is at least honest. There's no reason they couldn't opt to put back whatever features they've dropped in the future, but they're being up front that they're not going to now.

I'm not sure you understand what drop means. It doesn't imply a reason, it simply says they were... dropped from the release. Design decision, lack of time, lack of interest, lack of voodoo magic, it doesn't matter. Dropped is dropped.

Though if people care enough for their ill maintained features, they are certainly more than welcome to commit code to KDE!

When I tested KDE 4.4, it wasn't the most stable desktop I'd used, let's just hope they've been working on that... I honestly have to wonder why they keep adding features, they have plenty as it is, and from my experience KDE hasn't been the most stable desktop as of late, I really think it should be a high priority to make/keep the desktop as stable as possible, with new features as an afterthought.

From what I've seen of the KDE devs, you'd be exactly wrong on that front. New features are always prioritized because they're exciting, while bugfixes get ignored. I don't have the link handy, but awhile back I saw a bug report regarding (iirc) icon opacity, that had stagnated for years. From everything I've seen, the devs aren't as interested in making sure everything works flawlessly as they are in being progressive.

I really think at this point in KDE4 that they need to work on bugfixes, sure new features are exiting, but what's the point if they don't work?
There's a reason why I don't use KDE as my main desktop, it just sits next to my gnome/xfce/e17/whatever desktop, and every once in a while I boot in to KDE to play with it.

On a related note, Aaron Seigo had an interesting post on his blog (http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-dont-need-no-stinking-nepomuk-right.html [blogspot.com]) where he struggled (mostly in vain) to explain to people why akonadi and nepomuk were needed or even useful. A lot of comments were similar to yours... basically, just give us a stable KDE desktop to run apps and stop messing around with whizzbang buggy features and eye-candy.

In truth, akonadi and nepomuk are just a waste of system resources. Not only are they not needed, they're buggy as hell. Seems to me the kde devs have gotten lost in minutiae and forgotten that the point of a DE really is to provide a transparent, appealing framework from which to run apps. If it gets in the way or demands you read a lot of documentation, it means you're doing it wrong.

Hell, it was less effort for me to script my own DE functionality around awesome wm than to learn kde4 so I could support my users who want it.

In truth, akonadi and nepomuk are just a waste of system resources. Not only are they not needed, they're buggy as hell. Seems to me the kde devs have gotten lost in minutiae and forgotten that the point of a DE really is to provide a transparent, appealing framework from which to run apps. If it gets in the way or demands you read a lot of documentation, it means you're doing it wrong.

Hell, it was less effort for me to script my own DE functionality around awesome wm than to learn kde4 so I could support my users who want it.

'In truth, graphics and sound are just a waste of system resources. Not only are they not needed, they're buggy as hell. Seems to me the kde devs have gotten lost in minutiae and forgotten that the point of a shell really is to provide a transparent, appealing framework from which to run apps. If it gets in the way or demands you read a lot of documentation, it means you're doing it wrong.

Hell, it was less effort for me to script my own shell functionality around bash shell than to learn kde4 so I could sup

Yes that's all well and fine, but my point is that that particular functionality has no business being an integral part of the DE. Why is kde4 trying to be an OS? Just provide the DE, or at least make it properly modular so that all this extra crap isn't a requirement. It's too much like Apple or MS, they're trying to stuff this notion of "the kde way" down everyone's throats.

I guess it's just one more example of how mainstream Linux has lost sight of the UNIX philosophy.

This was a very enlightening blog post (and comments) to read. It does explain a lot about why KDE4 is the way it is.

That said, what are the options? As far as widget toolkits go, I much prefer Qt - it's miles ahead of Gtk from programmer's perspective, and it's faster as well. But I'm not aware of any DE (not WM, DE - with file manager and so on) written in plain Qt, with no KDE4-style reinvention of the desktop wheel, and useless bells and whistles.

But okay, I can stick to GNOME for the time being, especially since I don't really develop for Linux full-time, and who cares what widgets apps use under the hood? All well and good, except until that relatively recent announcement of "Gnome Shell" to come in 3.0, with those awful screenshots. Oh. My. Fucking. God! It's like GNOME devs looked at the trainwreck that is KDE4, became envious, and devised their own cunning plan to mess up their clean and usable desktop, and overall screw over existing users as much as possible, for the sake of pushing through some brand new bright UI design and usability ideas. I suspect this will go about as good as their "spacial file browser" did in the past, except that one was relatively minor and could be trivially disabled; whereas Shell design has far-reaching implications for entire desktop, and even third-party apps.

I had preventively moved to Xfce for now, which seems to be free from that "reinvent the wheel again, our own special way" disease mentality (so far). It's okay, but I'm still open to alternatives. What other options are there? (again, DEs, not WMs, so please don't suggest OpenBox etc).

That said, what are the options? As far as widget toolkits go, I much prefer Qt - it's miles ahead of Gtk from programmer's perspective, and it's faster as well. But I'm not aware of any DE (not WM, DE - with file manager and so on) written in plain Qt, with no KDE4-style reinvention of the desktop wheel, and useless bells and whistles...... It's okay, but I'm still open to alternatives. What other options are there? (again, DEs, not WMs, so please don't suggest OpenBox etc).

I'd personally tend to disagree. I think it's very much like comparing gnome to XFCE. Then again, Antico doesn't even use KDElibs so they'd have to try really hard to make it even close to as heavy as KDE.

The comment by Ron (emphasis by me) is the best and deserves a +5, Funny:

I'm surprised to see so many people claiming Nepomuk gives them no added value. Personally, I find the promise of Nepomuk, KDE 4 and semantic desktop enthrilling. Unfortunately this has been so for the past 2 years.

Development seems to me to be heading in the right direction - semantic desktop sounds the more natural way to deal with entities in the computer. But people are used to the traditional way of interaction with the machine, the switch to a novel way is hard to make. Moreover, Nepomuk services are now being developed, and immediate benefits are not apparent. Until the framework and services become more stable and reliable, and the benefits become more prominent, objection to Nepomuk will stay. The point is, at this point of time Nepomuk may be a nuisance, but it is injustifiablly wrong to judge it now. If Nepomuk development fulfills the dreams presented here and elsewhere, these critics of today might find they have been wrong all along, and by a long shot - they might find out that semantic desktop interaction is the right way of doing things. It feels attitude towards Nepomuk now is as has been to KDE 4 in the beginning. That it is immature and present creates problems, that would subside as it matures and the advantages become more present.

Productively, it seems that there should be a better (i.e. more apparent) UI to disable Strigi and Nepomuk - perhaps as a question dialog at install time or when the computer is under heavy load/RAM usage because of Strigi. That people have to actively seek the system settings option might be a fault in this case.

KDE is not free of problems - in fact I can't use it right now. I was greatly disappointed in finding that Kubuntu 9.10 on an old machine with 512MB of RAM is hardly usable. Battery life on my laptop is not satisfactory, and I can't install KDE on Windows for some reason.But the promise, and the hard work of all involved keep me assured that one day I'll be able to use my computers to their fullest using KDE (on Linux. And not any other DE). So this is thanks and keep up the good work.

Gee, no apparent benefits, if fact it's so resource hungry you can't use it, but you wonder why people don't like it... really?

I have no intention of reading blog posts that are trying to convince me that the biggest pieces of crap in computing were *needed*. They are there because the KDE developers want them, and think they are cool. And they don't care that they are slow, annoying, broken and take the system and its functionality together with them. When you're trying to convince me that software, which only feature is to annoy the user, is useful, you need to shut the fuck up.

i think the problem is... priorities.i believe nepomuk is cool. akonadi is cool, and useful. and we need those two.but AFTER we have solid foundation to use every day.don't get me wrong, i'm a kde user since... a looong time ago. i recently set up a laptop with kde4, and it indeed has progressed a lot since the first few releases, and is mostly useful. some features are very cool and i sometimes consider upgrading my main computer, which is still 3.5.10... but it's the little things and lots of them that an

I don't know about that. With a default install, logging into KDE 4.4 (with preloaded Konqueror, compositing, file indexing, etc) clocks in at a shade under 400mb. That's 400mb, not just for KDE, but for the whole system which runs apache, mysql and so on. Obviously Fluxbox is much less resource hungry, but calling KDE a "massive" memory user is not all that accurate.

You meant poor performance on all hardware. I'm using it on a Intel Core 2 Q6600 with 8 GB RAM and it is slow as hell compared to KDE 3.5 on my old Athlon XP 2100+, and even GTK+ on the same Athlon XP. And I badmouthed GTK+ about its slowness then. How wrong have I been?

Really? I recently switched to KDE from the supposedly-light-weight Xfce on my tiny underpowered netbook, and I honestly have not noticed any speed difference at all, even with most of the bells and whistles enabled. Haven't run out of memory yet, either, even with Firefox and KDE running.

Gnome might be faster. I wouldn't know because its interface design makes it unusable on netbooks. But if Gnome is faster than Xfce then there's something seriously wrong with the world.

and the reason why is because of Evolution. It's simply bloated beyond belief comparted to Slypheed, Pine or even Kmail. Yes I've used Kmail with Fluxbox along with Konq and Kwrite. Much smaller footprint even having to load the KDE binaries ontop of fluxbox then what I ever got with Evolution.

I tried to install that a while ago on kubuntu and it didn't work for whatever reason. Yes, yes I know, kubuntu sucks, every other kde4 implementation is perfect. Regardless, it didn't work. I just wish there would be a simple option to disable it, like opensuse has added; it makes no sense to me to have it on my desktop when I can just right click and get the same functionality.

IMO it's a prime example of the stubbornness and inflexibility of the current KDE dev team.

It's a goofy little icon thingy in the upper right corner of the screen that brings up a toolbox. Many KDE users find it extremely annoying; I personally don't use KDE as my primary desktop because I see it as too immature at this point, but having played with it, I definitely concur.

The only thing holding me back from upgrading to KDE4 on my primary work computer (from KDE 3.5.10) is that I need an accelerated triple head display. From what I can tell this is just not possible with KDE4, while it is working fine with KDE 3.5.10.

Xinerama needs to die and the driver vendors need to start taking RandR 1.3 support seriously (I'm looking at you Nvidia).. I found a triple-head Xinerama setup using two Quadro NVS 295s had such bad 2D performance (especially in KDE) that it was unusable.

Yes, indeed I agree. I also think that for the >2 output cards that Nvidia make, it would be good if TwinView would work across all outputs - at the moment I understand it present 2 TwinView "screens" each spanning 2 outputs. Not very useful. Ideally it would be a "QuadView" spanning all 4 outputs.

Can you do an accelerated triple/quad head setup with 2 Nvidia cards in any Windows flavour? If so, then what's holding Linux/xorg/KDE back?

Can you do an accelerated triple/quad head setup with 2 Nvidia cards in any Windows flavour? If so, then what's holding Linux/xorg/KDE back?

Years of neglect during the XFree86 days, basically. Xorg is still playing catch-up to Windows which had these concepts nailed years ago. It also doesn't help that Nvidia and ATI, as the two main vendors of graphics hardware, tend to ignore the Xorg architecture and implement things like multiple displays in their own way. The whole mess is an embarrassment, and one of the few major problems holding Linux back as a desktop OS:(

You know, I'm curious how many of the people complaining about bugginess and memory issues are running say, Kubuntu?

I'm on Arch Linux, and the KDE 4.x branch has been quite stable for me - the odd crash here and there, e.g. of Konsole, particularly early on, but nothing that really blew up the whole desktop.

And it's performed very well on my desktop, much more snappy/responsive than Gnome.

There's a lot of distributions that have done terribly, half-done jobs of packaging KDE. Kubuntu is a prime examble, seriously it's an absolute joke how terrible they've done. Last I heard, apparently it was because Kubuntu only had a single guy or something? That might just be a rumour, but I seriously think Canonical should just shelve the Kubuntu branch, instead of giving KDE a bad name.

Arch has been stable for me, and openSUSE was quite good for KDE as well. Don't know about other distributions, but I've heard that outside of those two, the rest are pretty much a joke - they just do a bad job of packaging KDE, or adding their own half-done patches, and pushing out low-quality KDE desktops.

Kubuntu is a prime examble, seriously it's an absolute joke how terrible they've done. Last I heard, apparently it was because Kubuntu only had a single guy or something? That might just be a rumour, but I seriously think Canonical should just shelve the Kubuntu branch, instead of giving KDE a bad name.

Their packages are in the same place, in fact. And you can even buy commercial support fro Kubuntu from Canonical. It's not one guy maintaining a port.

Then again it could just be typical ubuntu users are more from the newer to linux camp and thus complain more in general.

I think it is this. I had more problems using Debian's KDE 4.x branch (in relation to polickit action at least) than I have with kubuntu. I should give arch a go, though. I have plenty of time to mess with it at work.

Hmm, I really hope you know what you're talking about, and aren't just talking out of your rear-end...lol. Have you actually tried to use Kubuntu, then tried a different KDE 4.x distro and compared them?

I've been a KDE fan since the 3.5 days, and a Ubuntu fan from around those days as well. So it was a natural progression to use Kubuntu. I've basically tried every Kubuntu release since 7.04, until around 9.10, when I basically gave up on it. The 8.x branch, from memory, was particularly patchy for me.

Yes, people criticise every OS release, but the funny thing about the Kubuntu criticism is that:

1. It's dogged it from release to release - from the 6.X days, right through to the current 10.X days. You compare that against the criticism from say, Vista to Windows 7, or say, OSX 10.0 to 10.6, or heck, ironically, even KDE 4.0 to 4.4/4.5. Kubuntu has sucked, I regret to say, from day 1, right through to today, and unless Canonical suddently decide

Have you actually tried to use Kubuntu, then tried a different KDE 4.x distro and compared them?

I've used Kubuntu for years, both at home and at work. Before that, I used KDE on Red Hat at home. When they went off into Fedora-land, I switched to Debian and GNOME, with a little CentOS thrown in on the work side (used KDE on CentOS). Hated GNOME with a flying passion, went to Xfce. Along comes Ubuntu and then Kubuntu. Been using it ever since, and have been quit happy with it.

I was having various stability problems with KDE4 (up to and including 4.4) on pretty much every distro I've tried - Kubuntu was on the list, but also OpenSUSE and Mandriva.

I do run Arch now, and 4.4 seemed to be better in that in terms of stability. But the whole thing still feels so unpolished coming from either KDE 3.5 or GNOME 2.x that I can't be bothered.

It feels like KDE4 developers are chasing the uber vision of the desktop of the future (which is totally unlike the desktop of today) that they have in their head, and KDE4 releases that we see in the meantime are stepping stones on that road. So they're neither here nor there, and it is not clear when the road is going to end (if it is going to at all, which I'm starting to doubt at this point).

Mod parent up.
I was on Kubuntu for the last couple of years. You would think that on a distro whose sole reason for existence is to give people a KDE based version of Ubuntu, that you would be able to get anything done without logging in to GNOME. No dice. Ok...maybe we'll show some tolerance here. Maybe GTK apps would at least be themed to look like they fit in on KDE? Nope. OK...getting harder to stomach this distro. At least, something as frequently used as Firefox would be themed correctly in KDE - file dialogs, menus and all? No dice. In summary, its not a KDE distro - its KDE bolted on to a distro.
I finally grew tired of the constant tweaking required to get things to work right and the constant additional tweaking required every time some update was released. Time to jump ship. Looked around. There were reports of OpenSuse doing a good job. Tried them out. Paradise in comparison. Stuff just works. I can actually administer any part of the system from within KDE. Firefox is themed right - I didn't have to think about it. Guess what? I don't have GNOME installed, because I don't need it. Package management works beautifully and the fact that I can do a one click web install is pure icing on the cake. What do I miss from Kubuntu? Probably the software ratings. However, here is the important bit - has KDE broken once since I installed OpenSuse? Nope. I'm on KDE 4.4. and in 5 days, will be upgrading to OpenSuse 11.3 for some KDE 4.5 goodness.
See, the OpenSuse guys proved to me that a nice enjoyable, stable KDE experience is possible and that by the time I start salivating about the next KDE release, there's a new version of the distro that is ready to release. I'll wait for the distro because I trust them to iron out the kinks for me. They've already done it once. I'm sure they will do it again.
Look, if you're a KDE user and you're on Kubuntu, do yourself a huge favour and at least try out the OpenSuse live CD. A lot of effort has gone into that distro and it shows.

the odd crash here and there, e.g. of Konsole, particularly early on, but nothing that really blew up the whole desktop.

Yikes, that's why I stopped using KDE. I can't have an odd crash here and there of my terminal emulator. That might take with it an email I've been working on, or a long-running file download. Stability is critical.

Over the last two weeks, roughly since the first beta, 1459 new bugs have been reported, and 1643 bugs have been closed, so we're witnessing a lot of stabilization activity right now. More testing is in place, however, while the restless developers continue to create a rock-stable 4.5.0

Really nice to see much work being put in to stabilization, even if it means few less features:)

I know that the vast majority of people don't care about it, but I honestly want the PIM finished, if they are going to integrate akonadi with it, then fine, but finish it already...

Other than that, it was about time to make a big release with mostly bug fixes in it, maybe it's me but I don't find it as unstable or as memory hungry as people are claiming here, it was some versions ago, no argument there, but now it's pretty decent, for me, what is left are mostly annoyances, and I have suffer a lot of them,

From the bug reports, it seems like KDE still can't handle silly things nobody ever uses, like persistent printer settings [kde.org] or SSL certificates [kde.org]. Both of those are regressions from KDE 3.5, and it seems like KDE tries to mimic Mozilla when it comes to usability.

But yeah, we totally need more UI bling. Not like there was work to do.

Only if you're very, very high. Put away the bong, and I think you'll find that KDE4 quickly loses its appeal.

Dolphin will do whatever you were doing in Konqueror most likely.

It does not even come close to matching what I use Konq for.

I disliked Dolphin at first, but when tabs were implemented (several years ago), I wasn't able to discern any functional difference really.

This is known as "Putting lipstick on a pig".

A previous post summed it up very well as "the trainwreck that is KDE4". Here's a concept for the KDE devs: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." If you guys wanted to implement the Next Big Oooh Shiny, you should have started your own fucking project that could die a miserable flaming death on its

Many people stays with KDE 3.5, they/we deserve an alternative; otherwise GNOME people will get a lot of new users, and KDE (and maybe even worse, QT) will fade into oblivion as of 'what once was a great DE'.